Beware of NameFox

[morel]

Namefox, run by fellow DnF member Jeff, is doing a great job at grabbing expired names. His list of successes, which includes analyst.com and launches.com, is quite impressive.

However, be warned, Jeff will not necessarily respond to your emails!
I have contacted Jeff three times, to make three different domain requests, and I have only gotten back a response on my first request.

Why is he not responding?
I suspect that perhaps my bids are not high enough. I tried contacting George Kirikos about this, asking how much Jeff requires, for George has been a customer of Jeff. George has not replied. Whatever the reason that Jeff is not responding, it is very troubling.

Why is it troubling that Jeff may not necessarily respond to your emails?
Because it reveals that Jeff may then register the name that you requested for himself, which is a conflict of interest. Indeed, there is a conflict between Jeff's responsibilities as the owner of NameFox, a service that is supposed to be of service to others, and his own personal interests to acquire as many good domains as possible.

--David

 

[alldig]

I have had the same problems morel...

 

[GeorgeK]

Hi Morel/David,

I only didn't respond about that question about bids, as it would not do me any good to reveal bidding patterns. I've had no trouble getting my names from Jeff.

Sincerely,

George

 

[Jeffb]

Originally posted by morel
Namefox, run by fellow DnF member Jeff, is doing a great job at grabbing expired names. His list of successes, which includes analyst.com and launches.com, is quite impressive.

However, be warned, Jeff will not necessarily respond to your emails!
I have contacted Jeff three times, to make three different domain requests, and I have only gotten back a response on my first request.

Why is he not responding?
I suspect that perhaps my bids are not high enough. I tried contacting George Kirikos about this, asking how much Jeff requires, for George has been a customer of Jeff. George has not replied. Whatever the reason that Jeff is not responding, it is very troubling.

Why is it troubling that Jeff may not necessarily respond to your emails?
Because it reveals that Jeff may then register the name that you requested for himself, which is a conflict of interest. Indeed, there is a conflict between Jeff's responsibilities as the owner of NameFox, a service that is supposed to be of service to others, and his own personal interests to acquire as many good domains as possible.

--David

David,

I don’t recognize your name as a NameFox Customer, but I do respond to any email related to NameFox. Sure, I may miss one here and there, but if email a legitimate question to me, you will get an answer. A small number of customers want us to update them real time with emails as soon as any of the names they have submitted are outbid. This is impossible, as I'd spend the entire day trying to update hundreds of names real time. This practice would also be unfair to the customer who submitted the original bid. We still have plans for a more professional bidding, site, but with the specter of WLS, it's no longer a top priority for us. In the meantime, our stated policy remains that we will register names to the person who has submitted the highest bid to us by email prior to drop time.

We figure that it's more important to spend our efforts on registering the names.

Regarding registering names for our own account. We've made no secret about this and have emphasized to every customer that we occasionally register names for ourselves. I can promise you, however that we absolutely do not and will not ever use someone else's list to comprise our own. On rare occasions, a name or two may be on our list before a customer requests it, but the vast majority are not.

As you can tell from our site, our primary business is not that of a professional registrar like namewinner. We've been registering a small number of dropped names for ourselves for several years, and began offering registration services to others only because so many drop catchers had requested that we help them register names. We realize that not everyone will be satisfied with our lack of "front end" polish, but we think we've done a good job in registering some very competitive names for our customers. We'll continue to do so as long as customers wish for us to register names for them.

 

[Jeffb]

Originally posted by morel
Namefox, run by fellow DnF member Jeff, is doing a great job

--David

David,

Okay...I found your email to me that you wrote Monday 9/30. Let me respond..

In your email, you reqested a single name (I won't mention it here), and stated "The domain expired September xx, so it is not certain that it will be deleted". At the time I read your email, I did not think it warranted a response. I suppose I should have responded that you should please send the name to us when you think it will be deleted. For this I apologize.

 

[Jeffb]

Originally posted by alldig
I have had the same problems morel...

Mike, I don't recognize your name as NameFox customer either. Please let me know that date you sent emails to me, and I will research why you may have not have received a response.

 

[morel]

Thank you for the clarification.